10 of the Most Important Poker Concepts for Beginners

Dipping your toes into online poker’s waters can be a daunting experience, especially if you don’t have much experience of playing this crazy game. Thankfully, the PokerNews strategy pages are awash with easy-to-digest articles for beginners. One such article is the one you are reading now from our good friends at GTO Wizard, highlighting ten of the most important concepts for new poker players.

GTO Wizard specializes in helping poker players learn a Game Theory Optimal (GTO) strategy. GTO is highly complex, but GTO Wizard makes studying GTO strategy easy. One of the GTO Wizards’ latest articles gives ten tips on how to get your head around some helpful concepts while implementing some elements of GTO.

1.) Learn the Mechanics of Game Theory

Start your poker journey by learning the basics of game theory. Concepts such as equity, equity realization, expected value, pot odds, and stack-to-pot ratio (SPR) affect your decision-making.

Understand what hand strength is appropriate for the line you’re taking, relevant to the board’s texture. Having a sense of how poker’s mechanics work will help you become successful.

2.) Study Thresholds

Studying thresholds is one of the fastest ways to become a reasonably solid poker player. When in a hand and thinking in ranges, consider the weakest hand you would call with, the weakest hand you’d value bet, and the strongest hand you’d fold.

When you use GTO Wizard to analyze a hand, ask yourself those questions and compare your answer to the solution.

3.) Think in Terms of Ranges

Beginners often fall into the trap of thinking about individual hands instead of hand ranges. Not only is memorizing all frequencies for every spot nigh on impossible, but it’s also an inefficient way to improve your skills.

Instead of stressing over individual hands, look at your entire range. Your range should include calls, folds, raises, and bluffs. Even if you get the frequency of these actions wrong, according to the GTO Wizard solution, you are on the right track.

4.) Winning a Pot is Not Always the Best Way to Maximize Your Expected Value (EV)

You must understand that winning more often isn’t necessarily the highest EV play. Our brains tend to remember losses more strongly than wins, resulting in a bias. This bias tempts players to try to win the pot immediately instead of making the highest EV play. For example, sometimes, you must check vulnerable hands and let your opponent draw.

GTO Wizard uses rolling a die to explain this concept. Suppose you are offered a game where you owe $10 if the dice lands on 1-5, but you win $100 if it lands on 6. Approximately 83% of the time, you will lose $10 but stand to win $100 17% of the time. You’ll lose many more times when you win, even though your expected value in this game is ridiculously high ($8.33 per dice roll when you do the math).

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5.) Stop Overvaluing Big Cards

It is extremely common for beginners to overvalue big cards, particularly big pairs. Check any poker forum, and you’ll have players bemoaning their luck about having their pocket aces cracked as if they hold a magical power that should get paid off every time. Someone once famously said of pocket aces, “You either win a small pot or lose a big pot.”

GTO Wizard sums this up perfectly in its blog post, stating, “In poker, particularly 100 big blinds deep cash games, the ability to draw to the nuts and withstand multiple streets of aggression often far outweighs the value you can obtain with a dominated top pair.”

Run a couple of simulations in GTO Wizard, and you may be surprised that it teaches you to fold hands as strong as ace-jack offsuit to a three-bet. This is a hand that beginners will often struggle with after calling a three-bet, usually out of position.

6.) Realize the Importance of Nutted Hands

It is important that you quickly realize that most of your expected value comes from nutted hand, a fact that becomes more true the deeper you play. At first, many novice players do not understand that most hands are close to breakeven, so you must learn to play nutted hands correctly and extract as much value as possible.

Take a look at the graphic below. It shows a typical opening range from the button when playing a 100 big blinds deep cash game. Almost half of the hands opened from this position expect to make less than 0.1 big blinds in the long run!

7.) Become a Preflop Master

Mastering preflop is the most efficient way to improve your poker results drastically. Mistakes preflop turn into bigger, costlier mistakes on later streets. Play preflop well, and you’re more likely to play better postflop.

Luckily, GTO Wizard has many preflop solutions available for free; all you need is a free GTO account. The tool also offers training modes designed to help sharpen your preflop skills.

With some practice, your preflop strategy will become automatic, allowing you to concentrate on the flop, turn, and river.

8.) Expand Your Mind

If you have played poker at all, you have likely developed bad habits. You must let go of these bad habits and open your mind to a new way of thinking. When you run a hand through GTO Wizard, your brain will naturally try to rationalize the strategy to fit your worldview rather than attempting to expand your theory. Everyone does this, but such bias will limit your learning. Expand your mind rather than reinforce your current view on poker.

9.) Understand that Variance is Much Bigger Than You Can Comprehend

You will undoubtedly have heard about variance in poker and how people are running hot or really bad. While variance is part and parcel of poker, human brains can’t conceptualize it because of the numbers involved.

Poker players of a certain age may remember the online star Darrell “Gigabet” Dicken. He once said, “Everyone will eventually run worse than they thought was possible. The difference between a winner and a laser is the latter thinks he doesn’t deserve it.”

Just because you’ve run bad doesn’t mean you are owed some run-good, and vice-versa. Similarly, just because you’ve lost six out of the last seven aces versus kings all-in pots does not mean you’re about to embark on a winning streak with your pocket rockets. If you want some bedtime reading about this topic, Google “the law of large numbers.”

Also, understand that the long run that players talk about in poker is much longer than you realize. Play around with a variance calculator, and you’ll quickly see that it takes tens of thousands of hands to materialize any statistically significant edge.

Imagine you play $1/$2 in Vegas for 16 hours per week, giving you 25,000 hands annually. Suppose you usually win at a decent rate of 5 big blinds per 100 hands; you’d still have a near 21.5% of enduring a losing year! You’d still have a 13.2% chance of having a losing year if you doubled the number of hands. Imagine playing your best poker for a full year, being a big winner, yet ending down. According to the Primedope variance calculator, you’d need almost 3,000 big blinds (300 buy-ins) in your bankroll to have a less than 5% chance of going broke. Variance is nasty!

10.) Don’t Overplay Medium-Strength Hands

Overplaying medium-strength hands is a common mistake among poker players because they don’t have a medium-strength showdown value range. They rarely win at showdown with marginal holdings because they have folded out their opponent by being too aggressive (usually because they’re scared of being outdrawn) or find themselves at showdown against a narrow range that has them in a whole world of pain.

While this style works well against calling stations, it is easily exploitable by thinking opponents.

Develop a range for trapping that has showdown value or can pot control when you have a medium-strength holding. This will prevent any passive lines you take from always being dominated.